How do we make decisions as consumers? What do we pay attention to, and how do our initial responses predict our final choices? To what extent are these processes unconscious and cannot be reflected in overt reports? This course will provide you with an introduction to some of the most basic methods in the emerging fields of consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing. You will learn about the methods employed and what they mean. You will learn about the basic brain mechanisms in consumer choice, and how to stay updated on these topics. The course will give an overview of the current and future uses of neuroscience in business.

From the lesson

Learning & Memory

This module will focus on Learning & Memory. We will determine not only that there are multiple kinds of memory, but that they also serve multiple purposes. If anything, learning is the vehicle we need to understand the most in consumer behaviour. What causes memory, and can we be affected unconsciously by our memories? How can we measure memory effects, and what is the relationship between brand equity and the brain?
This module, we also have an interview with Prof. Richard Silberstein, who shares his view on neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience. Prof. Silberstein is the Founder and chairman of the neuromarketing company Neuro-Insight (http://www.neuro-insight.com/).

Meet the Instructors

Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

PhD in Neurobiology, Certified Neuropsychologist & Assistant Professor in Marketing & NeuroscienceHead of the Center for Decision Neuroscience, Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School, and Head of Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance at Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre

Welcome back to this course in Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience.

Today, we will talk about learning and memory.

As we will see, there are several ways in which we have learning and memory.

And memory comes in many forms.

And as consumers we are influenced by different kinds of memory.

But before we do that let's take an example.

What I'd like to do is to show you some objects on the screen.

And I want you to pay attention to the objects and

try to learn all the objects as they are there.

The objects will disappear in a few seconds so

try to learn as many as you can.

Here we go.

Now, how many objects do you remember?

Try to write down as many objects as you can.

Now an additional question: where was the butterfly positioned?

If you remember, it was on the left top corner.

Now let's have a look at the picture again and see how many correct you have

This exercise tells us that there is a distinction between knowing what

something is and knowing where something is.

So, knowing where the butterfly was is a, what we can call a spatial memory.

But knowing what something is requires you to know what the identity of

the object is.

Now, let's go to some definitions about learning and memory.

Learning, on the one side, is the acquisition and

containment of information.

Memory, on the other side, is the containment and

use of that kind of information for different purposes.

Memory comes in many forms depending on the duration of the memory.

We have sensory memories that last for milliseconds to seconds.

We have working memory or short-term memory that lasts for a few seconds.

We have intermediate memory that works for something like seconds minutes.

And finally, we have long-term memory that can span the entire lifespan.

Let's take the example of working memory.

This is the ability to keep in mind a few s, sample items for a few seconds.

So remembering a phone number, for

example, or the name of a person for up to 20 seconds.

A related concept is what we call cognitive load.

So, the more information you tend to put into that short-term memory,

the higher the cognitive loads.

And in a recent study here at the CBS we tested people's cognitive load

while they were reading financial reports.

What we did during the study was to manipulate the way in which we added or

subtracted information.

So how much information people are reading,

basically, in the financial reports.

The more information people read,

the higher the cognitive load we could observe.

We looked at both pupil dilation and brain responses,

such as the theta activation in the frontal lobe.

What we also observed is that trained people had a lower cognitive load

while they're reading the reports.

Let's have a look at a tentative scheme for how we can divide long-term memory.